Age of Empires

• 1. Introduction

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  Age of Empires is a historical real-time strategy series that has sold more than 25 million copies. Its most revealing artifact may be a picture of games that did not yet exist. Several collectors' editions of Age of Empires III shipped with a hardcover artbook. Its final page shows a pictorial history of the series. Beneath each panel sits a Roman numeral, counting from I up to V. Those numerals promised an Age of Empires IV and an Age of Empires V. Ensemble Studios employee Sandy Petersen later said the image "was total speculation on their part". The studio behind the series would not survive to build either game. So how did a team that borrowed its history from the children's shelves make something so durable? How did a computer opponent learn to play by the same rules as a human? And what happened to the series when its creators were gone?

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• 2. Research From the Children's Shelf

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  Bruce Shelley, designer on Age of Empires, once described where Ensemble Studios found its reference material. Most of it came from the children's sections of libraries. The team did plenty of research, since the games were built on real events, but Shelley said it was never deep. He called that shallow approach "a good idea for most entertainment products".

  The aim, he explained, was for the players to have fun, "not its designers or researchers".

  At the Games Convention Developers Conference in 2007, Shelley offered a theory of why the series worked. Its success lay in "making a game which appealed to both the casual and hardcore gamer". He also insisted the games were not really about history itself. They were "about the human experience", and so they looked past what humans had done toward what they might do next, such as "going into space".

  The third game in the line broke the pattern. Ensemble Studios worried the team "couldn't get away" with yet another game built on real history. After weighing several options, the designers settled on mythology as the setting. Research was only half the work, though. The other half was building an opponent that would not cheat.

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• 3. A Fair Fight

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  AI specialist Dave Pottinger remembers the original Age of Empires as a project where the computer opponent got very high priority. The team spent over a year on it. Pottinger said the finished AI wins through tactics and strategy. It does not "cheat" by handing itself bonus resources or by making its units stronger than normal.

  Pottinger later added that the team took pride in an AI that played a "fair game". It did not know what the player was doing, and it followed the same rules as its human opponents.

  That opponent also learns. When a player skips the story-backed scenarios and fights the AI in individual battles, the computer adapts to the player's strategies. It even remembers which games it won and lost. After several matches it can overcome a favorite strategy and easily wreck the player's villages. Age of Empires III calls these battles a "Skirmish". Players there can prepare by "building a Deck", which swaps their Home City shipments for improved alternatives.

  The Conquerors, the expansion to Age of Empires II, gave the AI a high priority again. The result was the "smart villager". Once a player builds a structure that stores or produces resources, these villagers go and gather the matching goods, such as crops from farms or ore from exposed deposits. The feature carried into later games in the series.

  Age of Mythology: The Titans went furthest by giving players an AI debugger for custom scenarios. With it they could change the settings of computer players and make them follow set patterns. Only simpler AI changes had been possible in the first two games.

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• 4. Sound and Sight

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  Stephen Rippy has served as the series' music director since the first game. His brother David Rippy and Kevin McMullan have occasionally helped him. For the original Age of Empires, he built music from the sounds of period instruments. Some came from real instruments and some from their digital samples. The tunes followed extensive research into the cultures, styles, and instruments involved.

  Rippy found the sound work on The Age of Kings easy, because so much was known about instruments of the Middle Ages. The team could simply reproduce the tunes. Age of Mythology went another way, with orchestral instrumentation. McMullan said the team also gathered large numbers of audio recordings from zoos. They built what he called "a massive sound library of their own material". For Age of Empires III, Rippy turned back to historical instruments. He named "bagpipes and field drums" as tools for giving it a realistic feel.

  The visuals improved with each release. Eurogamer welcomed female villagers in The Age of Kings, since the original game offered only male ones. Allgame praised its grouping and path-finding systems, but complained that units were sometimes hard to tell apart. Many reviewers agreed with that complaint. Even so, Game Revolution called it "the best looking of the 2D RTS games out there right now".

  Age of Mythology drew more praise. IGN called its graphics "a joy to watch... awesome", GameSpot gave them nine out of ten, and PC Gamer said they "are packed with detail".

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• 5. Three Ages of Main Releases

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  Age of Empires reached shelves on the 15th of October 1997. It was the first major release from Ensemble Studios and one of the first history-based real-time strategy games. It ran on the Genie game engine. GameSpot described it as a mix of Civilization and Warcraft. Players picked from 12 civilizations and guided them from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. The expansion The Rise of Rome arrived on the 31st of October 1998, bringing four new civilizations, including the Romans.

  The game then had a long second life. In April 2013, Age of Empires II: HD Edition arrived on Steam. A fan-made modpack for The Conquerors, called The Forgotten, grew into an official expansion with SkyBox Labs and Forgotten Empires. It reached the HD Edition on Steam in November 2013. The African Kingdoms followed in November 2015, and Rise of the Rajas on the 19th of December 2016.

  The WarChiefs came out on the 17th of October 2006 with three new civilizations, focused on Native Americans. The Asian Dynasties went on sale on the 23rd of October 2007 with three more. For this one, Ensemble Studios teamed up with Big Huge Games, the first joint venture for either studio. Schedules lined up: Ensemble was busy with other work, especially Halo Wars, while the Big Huge Games strategy team had few projects. Big Huge Games did most of the work, and Brian Reynolds joined Bruce Shelley as lead designer. Ensemble's Greg Street and Sandy Petersen joined the brainstorming and kept control of the final product.

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• 6. Gods, Handhelds, and Phones

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  Age of Mythology was published on the 30th of October 2002. It shared much of the main series' gameplay and counted as part of the series, despite its different focus. Its campaign follows Arkantos, an Atlantean trying to learn why his people have fallen out of favor with Poseidon. The game sold more than one million units in four months and scored 89% on both GameRankings and Metacritic.

  The expansion The Titans came out on the 21st of October 2003 and added the Atlanteans as a playable civilization. Its campaign is shorter. It centers on Kastor, the son of Arkantos, who believes the lies of the titans and frees them from Tartarus. Critics rated it highly, but it failed to match the sales of the original.

  The name Age of Kings has been used for two other games. Konami brought one to the PlayStation 2 around five years before the DS version, with little promotion, and it sold poorly. Backbone Entertainment then made a turn-based Nintendo DS game, published by Majesco on the 14th of February 2006. It resembles Advance Wars, but its play follows the PC version. It scored 80% on both aggregators.

  On the 16th of August 2010, Microsoft announced Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play game built with Robot Entertainment on Games for Windows Live. It promised a persistent online capital city that kept growing while players were away, cooperative quests, and trading. Premium content could be earned or purchased. In September 2013, Microsoft said the game would run only until the 1st of July 2014. Maintaining the content had become too expensive.

  Mobile titles followed. Smoking Gun Interactive's touch-based Castle Siege, announced on the 25th of August 2014, arrived on the 17th of September 2014 for Windows PC and Windows Phone 8. KLab Games developed World Domination, released on the 7th of December 2015 and shut down on the 30th of November 2016. Age of Empires Mobile, from TiMi Studio Group, was announced on the 25th of October 2022 and launched on Android and iOS on the 17th of October 2024.

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• 7. Closure and Return

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  In 2008, Microsoft announced it would close Ensemble Studios once Halo Wars was finished. Some employees would form a new team within Microsoft Studios. Kevin Unangst, director of Games for Windows, denied this meant the end of the series. He told The San Francisco Chronicle, "we're very excited about the future potential for Age of Empires". Edge reported that Shane Kim, Microsoft's corporate vice president of interactive entertainment, confirmed Microsoft still owned the series and planned to continue it. Bruce Shelley wrote on his blog that he would take no part in any new studio.

  The studio's last project had its own link to the series. Bungie picked Ensemble to make Halo Wars partly because of Age of Empires. They called Ensemble the right choice "to realize the original vision of Halo", which had begun life as a real-time strategy game.

  The series returned through remasters. In June 2017, Adam Isgreen, creative director at Xbox Game Studios, announced Age of Empires: Definitive Edition at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It offered overhauled graphics with 4K support and a remastered soundtrack. Planned for the 19th of October 2017, it slipped to the 20th of February 2018 and launched on the Microsoft Store.

  On the 21st of August 2017, Microsoft announced definitive editions of the second and third games, along with Age of Empires IV, made by Relic Entertainment. On the 30th of May 2019, it said all three remasters were coming to Steam.

  The Age of Empires II edition was built by Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media, and Wicked Witch Software. It added four civilizations: the Bulgarians, Cumans, Lithuanians, and Tatars. It also brought three new campaigns, a spectator mode, and tournament features. It was released on the 14th of November 2019. Forgotten Empires co-founder Bert Beeckman confirmed the older HD Edition would stay on sale.

  Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition ran closed betas in early 2020 on Steam and the Microsoft Store. The first began on the 11th of February 2020 and lasted until the 19th. It was released on the 15th of October 2020.

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• 8. Verdicts and Afterlife

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  GameSpot found the first Age of Empires confused in design, while Computer and Video Games praised it for both single-player and multiplayer. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences named it the 1998 Computer Strategy Game of the Year. It sold over three million units by 2000. The Rise of Rome sold one million that year and averaged 80% on GameRankings.

  The Age of Kings did better still, with 92% on both GameRankings and Metacritic, the highest of any game in the series. Microsoft shipped more than two million copies to retailers. The Age of Kings won the Academy's Computer Strategy Game of the Year in 2000, and The Conquerors took it in 2001. Critics said The Conquerors expanded the game well, though some raised balance problems.

  Reaction to Age of Empires III was mixed. Game Revolution said it was "about as much fun" as a history textbook. Even so, it sold over two million copies, announced on the 18th of May 2007, and won GameSpy's real-time strategy game of the year. The WarChiefs scored lower than the base game, and The Asian Dynasties lower still, at 80%.

  By 2004, before Age of Empires III shipped, the franchise had sold over 15 million copies. As of 2008, five of its games had each topped one million.

  In 2005, Shelley complained of an "innovation bias" among critics. He pointed to a 60% from Computer Gaming World for a game he called "perhaps the best selling PC game in the world". Reviewers, he said, had expected "something really new". He believed the series' own innovation, rather than imitation, was the key to its success.

  Others borrowed from it. Critics credited Age of Empires with influencing Rise of Nations, Empire Earth, and Cossacks. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds used the Genie engine and was seen as a close replica. IGN began its review with, "I love Age of Star Wars, I mean Star Empires. Whatever it's called, I dig it."

  Shelley also described the series' effect on young players in an October 2005 GameSpy interview. Parents told Ensemble Studios their children were reading about ancient Greece because they loved playing with the triremes. Others wanted to check out medieval history books because the game had taught them what a trebuchet was.

  The series still draws crowds. The Red Bull Wololo: El Reinado tournament for Age of Empires II took place in 2024 at the Castle of Almodóvar in Spain. Eight top players competed, including TheViper and Hera. Hera won the final 5-1. The event peaked at 85,800 concurrent viewers, the second-highest in the game's history and 12% above the previous series.

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